1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electric ovens, and more specifically, to an infrared heated electric oven having reduced cooking time and improved browning consistency.
2. Background of the Related Technology
Over the years there have been many attempts at finding ways to speed up cooking. Products such as convection, microwave, and infrared ovens have been devised in order to try and speed up the cooking process. With present day ovens, there were usually some tradeoffs the consumer had to accept in order to gain faster cooking speeds. Usually cooking quality would be sacrificed in favor of speed. This is why microwave ovens for warming and cooking of foods have made such a significant penetration in to the home. There is a significant gain in speed using microwave cooking, however, the cooked food quality is very poor. Heretofore, consumers have been willing to consume poorer quality prepared foods in order to enjoy the faster warming and/or cooking time. Unfortunately foods cooked in a microwave oven have substantially all of their moisture evaporated by the microwaves and thus suffer from a lack taste. For other cooking technologies like convection and infrared, consumers were forced to accept minimal speed increase with the convection ovens, and very limited cooking quality and time improvements with the infrared ovens. Infrared ovens perform faster when cooking frozen pizzas and toasting bread, however, the infrared ovens lacked in achieving good quality and speed in other cooking tasks.
Therefore, a problem exists, and a solution is required for improving the speed and quality of cooking food with infrared radiant heat.